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The journey is always the same, and never the same. As Ian Bostridge remarks, at the end of his prize-winning book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, when the wanderer asks Der Leiermann, “Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?”, in the final song of Winterreise, the ‘crazy but logical procedure would be to go right back to the beginning of the whole cycle and start all over again’.

It felt rather decadent to be sitting in an opera house at 12pm. Even more so given the passion-fuelled excesses of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, which might seem rather too sensual and savage for mid-day consumption.

Manitoba Opera opened its 45th season with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly proving that the aching heart as expressed through art knows no racial or cultural divide, with the Italian composer’s self-avowed favourite opera still able to spread its poetic wings across time and space since its Milan premiere in 1904.

In 1992, concert promoter Heinz Liebrecht introduced pianist Julius Drake to tenor Ian Bostridge and an acclaimed, inspiring musical partnership was born. On Wenlock Edge formed part of their first programme, at Holkham Hall in Norfolk; and, so, in this recital at Middle Temple Hall, celebrating their 25 years of music-making, the duo included Vaughan Williams’ Housman settings for tenor, piano and string quartet alongside works with a seventeenth-century origin or flavour.

Not many (maybe any) of the new operas presented by San Francisco Opera over the past 10 years would lure me to the War Memorial Opera House a second time around. But for Girls of the Golden West just now I would be there again tomorrow night and the next, and I am eagerly awaiting all future productions.

It’s taken a while for Rossini’s Semiramide to reach the Covent Garden stage. The last of the operas which Rossini composed for Italian theatres between 1810-1823, Semiramide has had only one outing at the Royal Opera House since 1887, and that was a concert version in 1986.

‘His master’s masterpiece, the work of heaven’: ‘a common fountain’ from which flow ‘pure silver drops’. At the risk of effulgent hyperbole, I’d suggest that Antonio’s image of the blessed governance and purifying power of the French court - in the opening scene of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi - is also a perfect metaphor for the voice of French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, as it slips through Handel’s roulades like a silken ribbon.

Here are five complete song sets by two of the greatest masters of French song. The performers are highly competent. I should have known, given the rave reviews that their 2015 recording of modern Norwegian songs received.

The opera world barely knows how to handle works that have significant amounts of spoken dialogue. Conductors and stage directors will often trim the dialogue to a bare minimum (Magic Flute), have it rendered as sung recitative (Carmen), or have it spoken in the vernacular though the sung numbers may often be performed in the original language (Die Fledermaus).

Here is the latest CD from a major label promoting a major new soprano. Aida Garifullina is utterly remarkable: a lyric soprano who also can handle coloratura with ease. Her tone has a constant shimmer, with a touch of quick, narrow vibrato even on short notes.

From the start of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s splendid, new production of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre conflict and resolution are portrayed throughout with moving intensity. The central character Brünnhilde is sung by Christine Goerke and her father Wotan by Eric Owens.

Compared to the oft-explored world of German lieder and French chansons, the songs of Russia are unfairly neglected in recordings and in the concert hall. The raw emotion and expansive lyricism present in much of this repertoire was clearly in evidence at the Holywell Music Room for the penultimate day of the celebrated Oxford Lieder Festival.

This concert was an event on several levels - marking a decade since the death of Stockhausen, the fortieth anniversary (almost to the day) since Singcircle first performed STIMMUNG (at the Round House), and their final public performance of the piece. It was also a rare opportunity to hear (and see) Stockhausen’s last completed purely electronic work, COSMIC PULSES - an overwhelming visual and aural experience that anyone who was at this concert will long remember.

Bampton Classical Opera is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2017 Young Singers’ Competition is mezzo-soprano Emma Stannard and the runner-up is tenor Wagner Moreira. The winner of the accompanists’ prize, a new category this year, is Keval Shah.

With this recording of Mozart’s 1771 opera, Il sogno di Scipione (Sicpio’s Dream), Classical Opera continue their progress through the adolescent composer’s precocious achievements and take another step towards the fulfilment of their complete Mozart opera series for Signum Classics.

The problem with turning this classic into a romantic opera
was compounded, though, by the poet’s ironic outlook, and this
Tchaikovsky proposed to answer by changing the ending — by having the
two protagonists admit their love and run off together. A friend of his
sister’s took him to her garden house and, in the course of one of
those long Russian summer evenings, argued him out of his resolve, convinced
him to keep Pushkin’s classically balanced conclusion: as Onegin once
coldly, preachily rejected the ardent young Tatiana, now, years later, when
he has fallen in love with her, Tatiana coldly dismisses
him. (No record survives of that conversation in the garden house,
but what an opera it would make! — something earnest and chatty, like
Dargomyzhsky’s Stone Guest or Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Mozart and Salieri.)

In both Pushkin — where Tatiana simply states she will remain
faithful to her marriage vows — and in the opera, where a rather more
passionate debate takes place (because romantic opera requires passionate
duets, and Tchaikovsky had denied himself one in Act I), Tatiana’s
nobility in the teeth of her feelings, and Onegin’s despair, are made
far more palpable in the music-drama.

It’s interesting to compare the two Onegins — novel
and opera — to the two Thaïs, novel and opera, brought to our
attention at the Met a few weeks ago. Anatole France was an ironist, and his
novel about a courtesan who becomes a saint while the saint who converted her
loses his faith is, frankly, a satire — in order to make a romantic
opera out of it, Massenet had to invent its characters anew, and the degree
of his success depends on whether or not you care for Massenet’s music.
(I don’t.)

Pushkin was a sophisticated romantic, or rather, he had been one in his
youth, and the plot of Onegin is his ironical view of the sort of
young man he had been (or known), and the sort of woman he had loved. His
characters are all great readers of French and English literature — he
tells us just what each has been reading (Lensky aloud to Olga) — and
their behavior owes a great deal to self-conscious affectation. Tatiana
cannot even write her famous letter in Russian — she assumes a love
letter must be written in French, her only model for such things.
(Tchaikovsky changed that, of course.) Onegin identifies with Byron’s
scarred, bored, doomed heroes even before he kills his best friend and goes
into exile — and it is Pushkin’s joke that, having traveled the
world like an aimless Byronic hero, he comes home to find he would actually
have been quite happy living on a Russian country estate with the right wife.
But she is no longer available — unlike so many society ladies, she is
monogamous, and receives his overtures with distaste. We have had a hint of
this — which Tchaikovsky retains for his opening scene — in her
mother’s recollections of the novels she used to read
(Richardson, Grandison), of the worthless man she fell in love with,
of her arranged marriage to Tatiana’s father, of her contentment with
“habit” over happiness. Like mother, like daughter: in the scenes
that follow, we see the same story play out in the younger generation.

Ekaterina Semenchuk as Olga and Piotr Beczala as Lenski.

When Tchaikovsky dramatized this sixty years after it was written, as his
sister’s friend pointed out, the novel was too well known and too well
loved to alter its conclusion. At that, he had a far easier time than
Massenet in making musically romantic figures out of his hero and heroine
— because they were more romantic to begin with, or maybe he was just
better at it. Too, failing to find the proper ironic tone for Onegin himself
(he comes into his own as a character only in the last act, when he has
abandoned his posing), Tchaikovsky undercut him by making naïve Tatiana the
focus of Act I, doomed Lensky the focus of Act II, and giving the big aria in
Act III to Tatiana’s elderly husband, a cipher in the novel. Onegin is
the odd man out in his own opera; this can make him hard to portray
sympathetically, though Dmitri Hvorostovsky achieved it at the Met two years
ago (and on HDTV telecast), appearing callow in Act I and passionate in Act
III as if he had indeed undergone a soul-transformation.

The current Met revival of Onegin, though sumptuously cast and
gloriously sung, has the flaw that Thomas Hampson is rather too old, too
saturnine, too gray — in manner and appearance if not voice — to
portray the poseur of Act I. His acting is carefully judged, his singing
suave (he’s in better voice than he was in Thaïs, where his
affect hardly seemed that of a desert ascetic), but his grayness, his
chilliness, cause one to doubt the romantic conversion. This is not fatal in
so excellent a revival, but it does restrain one’s enthusiasm —
not least because Robert Carsen’s minimalist production all but omits
the social settings that Tchaikovsky thought so important to comprehension of
the story: we focus on the individuals, and if they let us down, there is
nothing to fall back on. I will discuss my problems with this staging
below.

Renée Fleming scored one of her worthiest triumphs of recent seasons in
the last revival of Onegin, but to my mind Karita Mattila is better.
If you (as I do) usually prefer one of these ladies to the other, Tatiana
will not change your mind — if you love both, you will be very happy.
As she has shown in Jenufa and Katya Kabanova, Mattila has
a particular affinity for young women troubled by romantic complications. In
the opening scene, following Pushkin, we find her buried in her book among
the birch trees, but her Letter Scene is a sensual awakening, and here the
shining metal of her voice takes on a quality, one might call it, of
adolescent idealism. This is certainly enhanced by her childish, clumsy
movements, the trembling of her hand when Onegin returns her letter, make
this a finished stage portrayal, but it is her hopeful, springing soliloquy
that thrills, makes her a girl newly awakened to love, a heroine. The woman
who appears in Act III not only moves and dresses differently, she seems to
sing with a different voice, a thicker, more mature sound, a womanly voice as
opposed to a girlish one. Both voices are beautiful, it is hardly necessary
to state — but that she has thought out how to deploy them to make us
understand two different Tatianas, girl and wife, is a feature of
Mattila’s claim to be the greatest singing actress on the lyric stage
today.

The young Polish tenor Piotr Beczala, who is having quite a winter
replacing less sturdy tenors in Lucia and Rigoletto, sang a
perfect Lensky — ardent, jejune, his mood flashing from ecstasy to
despair, with a delicious, youthfully liquid quality to his voice and even a
hint of Italianate sob. Olga usually makes no impression, but Ekaterina
Semenchuk’s attractive presence and luscious Slavic mezzo made us
notice her brief moment at center stage in the opening scene. Wendy White
sang an effective Larina, Barbara Dever a most imposing Filippyevna, Tony
Stevenson a rather uncharacterized Triquet, and Sergei Aleksashkin a stalwart
Prince Gremin without having quite the authority to overshadow the lovers in
the last act as a really thunderous Russian bass will often do. Jiří
Bělohlávek led the Met orchestra in a sublime, supportive, lithely
flowing and (a few brass blooples aside) exquisite account of this wonderful
score.

So we come to Robert Carsen’s scenery-free production, on which
viewers bitterly divide. The point of its bareness appears to be to
focus the drama more closely on the principals to the exclusion of all else
— the social backdrop against which Pushkin and Tchaikovsky have
lovingly placed them, for instance. The score contains three extended dance
sequences by which Tchaikovsky unfolds the story from rural simplicity to
gentry interacting to the grand world, and these are, to say the least,
underplayed here — bored-looking peasant women rake leaves, cramped
choristers sing of the pleasure of dancing while unable to move, and against
the aristocratic polonaise, a troupe of footmen redress Onegin in court
costume, scenting his fingers and touching up his coiffure. Since the
characters are social beings, whose motivations owe a great deal to
appearances, I get Tchaikovsky’s point but not Carsen’s. True,
one does not waste time during the name-day party trying to find the lovers
in the crowd, but there is no pleasure to be seen in that cramped assembly.
The dance music is intrinsic to the opera, and it seems unnecessarily
affected not to permit dancing if the orchestra is going to play all of it.
What the staging does is not to draw attention to the principals or their
story — the opera and the singers have already done that — but to
the stage director. Did we need that? Is anything worthwhile accomplished by
it?

Still: an engrossing sung and acted Onegin, not to be
missed; if possible to be seen repeatedly.